Lonesome Land Part 14

"Will you bring him to me here, Mr. Burnett? I do not feel quite equal to invading a saloon and begging him, on my knees, to come--after the conventional manner of drunkards' wives. But I should like to see him."

Kent stared. "He ain't in any shape to argue with," he remonstrated. "You better wait a while."

She rested her chin upon her hands, folded upon the high chair back, and gazed at him with her tawny eyes, that somehow reminded Kent of a lioness in a cage. He thought swiftly that a lioness would have as much mercy as she had in that mood.

"Mr. Burnett," she began quietly, when Kent's nerves were beginning to feel the strain of her silent stare, "I want to see Manley _as he is now_. I will tell you why. You aren't a woman, and you never will understand, but I shall tell you; I want to tell _somebody_.

"I was raised well--that sounds queer, but modesty forbids more. At any rate, my mother was very careful about me. She believed in a girl marrying and becoming a good wife to a good man, and to that end she taught me and trained me. A woman must give her all--her life, her past, present, and future--to the man she marries. For three years I thought how unworthy I was to be Manley's wife. _Unworthy_, do you hear? I slept with his letters under my pillow." The self-contempt in her tone! "I studied the things I thought would make me a better companion out here in the wilderness. I practiced hours and hours every day upon my violin, because Manley had admired my playing, and I thought it would please him to have me play in the firelight on winter evenings, when the blizzards were howling about the house! I learned to cook, to wash clothes, to iron, to sweep, and to scrub, and to make my own clothes, because Manley's wife would live where she could not hire servants to do these things. I lived a beautiful, picturesque dream of domestic happiness.

"I left my friends, my home, all the things I had been accustomed to all my life, and I came out here to live that dream!" She laughed bitterly.

"You can easily guess how much of it has come true, Mr. Burnett. But you don't know what it costs a girl to come down from the clouds and find that reality is hard and ugly--from dreaming of a cozy little nest of a home, and the love and care of--of Manley, to the reality--to carrying water and chopping wood and being left alone, day after day, and to find that his love only meant--Oh, you don't know how a woman clings to her ideals! You don't know how I have dung to mine. They have become rather tattered, and I have had to mend them often, but I have clung to them, even though they do not resemble much the dreams I brought with me to this horrible country.

"But if it's true, what you tell me--if Manley himself is another disillusionment--if beyond his selfishness and his carelessness he is a drunken brute whom I can't even respect, then I'm done with my ideals. I want to see him just as he is. I want to see him once without the halo I have kept shining all these months. I've got my life to live--but I want to face facts and live facts. I can't go on dreaming and making believe, after this." She stopped and looked at him speculatively, absolutely without emotion.

"Just before I left home," she went on in the same calm quiet, "a girl showed me some verses written by a very wicked man. At least, they say he is very wicked--at any rate, he is in jail. I thought the verses horrible and brutal; but now I think the man must be very wise. I remember a few lines, and they seem to me to mean Manley.

"For each man kills the thing he loves-- Some do it with a bitter look, Some with a flattering word; The coward does it with a kiss, The brave man with a sword.

"I don't remember all of it, but there was another line or two:

"The kindest use a knife, because The dead so soon grow cold.

"I wish I had that poem now--I think I could understand it. I think--"

"I think you've got talking hysterics, if there is such a thing," Kent interrupted harshly. "You don't know half what you're saying. You've had a hard day, and you're all tired out, and everything looks outa focus. I know--I've seen men like that sometimes when some trouble hit 'em hard and unexpected. What you want is sleep; not poetry about killing people. A man, in the shape you are in, takes to whisky. You're taking to graveyard poetry--and, if you ask _me_, that's worse than whisky. You ain't normal.

What you want to do is go straight to bed. When you wake up in the morning you won't feel so bad. You won't have half as many troubles as you've got now."

"I knew you wouldn't understand it," Val remarked coldly, still staring at him with her chin on her hands.

"You won't yourself, to-morrow morning," Kent declared unsympathetically, and called Mrs. Hawley from the kitchen. "You better put Mrs. Fleetwood to bed," he advised gruffly. "And if you've got anything that'll make her sleep, give her a dose of it. She's so tired she can't see straight." He was nearly to the outside door when Val recovered her speech.

"You men are all alike," she said contemptuously. "You give orders and you consider yourselves above all the laws of morality or decency; in reality you are beneath them. We shouldn't expect anything of the lower animals!

How I _despise_ men!"

"Now you're _talking_," grinned Kent, quite unmoved. "Whack us in a bunch all you like--but don't make one poor devil take it all. Men as a cla.s.s are used to it and can stand it." He was laughing as he left the room, but his amus.e.m.e.nt lasted only until the door was closed behind him. "Lord!" he exclaimed, and drew a deep breath. "I'd sure hate to have that little woman say all them things about _me!_" and glanced involuntarily over his shoulder to where a crack of light showed under the faded green shade of one of the parlor windows.

He crossed the street and entered the saloon where Manley was still drinking heavily, his face crimson and blear-eyed and brutalized, his speech thickened disgustingly. He was sprawled in an armchair, waving an empty gla.s.s in an erratic attempt to mark the time of a college ditty six or seven years out of date, which he was trying to sing. He leered up at Kent.

"Wife 'sall righ'," he informed him solemnly. "Knew she would be--fine guards's got out there. 'Sall righ'--somebody shaid sho. Have a drink."

Kent glowered down at him, made a swift, mental decision, and pipped him by the shoulder. "You come with me," he commanded. "I've got something important I want to tell you. Come on--if you can walk."

"'Course I c'n walk all righ'. Shertainly I can walk. Wha's makes you think I can't walk? Want to inshult me? 'Sall my friends here--no secrets from my friends. Wha's want tell me? Shay it here."

Kent was a big man; that is to say, he was tall, well-muscled and active.

But so was Manley. Kent tried the power of persuasion, leaving force as a last, doubtful result. In fifteen minutes or thereabouts he had succeeded in getting Manley outside the door, and there he balked.

"Wha's matter wish you?" he complained, pulling back. "C'm on back 'n' have drink. Wha's wanna tell me?"

"You wait. I'll tell you all about it in a minute. I've got something to show you, and I don't want the bunch to get next. Savvy?"

He had a sickening sense that the subterfuge would not have deceived a five-year-old child, but it was accepted without question.

He led Manley stumbling up the street, evading a direct statement as to his destination, pulled him off the board walk, and took him across a vacant lot well sprinkled with old shoes and tin cans. Here Manley fell down, and Kent's patience was well tested before he got him up and going again.

"Where y' goin'?" Manley inquired pettishly, as often as he could bring his tongue to the labor of articulation.

"You wait and I'll show you," was Kent's unvaried reply.

At last he pushed open a door and led his victim into the darkness of a small, windowless building. "It's in here--back against the wall, there,"

he said, pulling Manley after him. By feeling, and by a good sense of location, he arrived at a rough bunk built against the farther wall, with a blanket or two upon it.

"There you are," he announced grimly. "You'll have a sweet time getting anything to drink here, old boy. When you're sober enough to face your wife and have some show of squaring yourself with her, I'll come and let you out." He had pushed Manley down upon the bunk, and had reached the door before the other could get up and come at him. He pulled the door shut with a slam, slipped a padlock into the staple, and snapped it just before Manley lurched heavily against it. He was cursing as well as he could--was Manley, and he began kicking like an unruly child shut into a closet.

"Aw, let up," Kent advised him, through a crack in the wall. "Want to know where you are? Well, you're in Hawley's ice house; you know it's a fine place for drunks to sober up in; it's awful popular for that purpose. Aw, you can't do any business kicking--that's been tried lots of times. This is sure well built, for an ice house. No, I can't let you out. Couldn't possibly, you know. I haven't got the key--old lady Hawley has got it, and she's gone to bed hours ago. You go to sleep and forget about it. I'll talk to you in the morning. Good night, and pleasant dreams!"

The last thing Kent heard as he walked away was Manley's profane promise to cut Kent's heart out very early the next day.

"The darned fool," Kent commented, as he stopped in the first patch of lamplight to roll a cigarette. "He ain't got another friend in town that'd go to the trouble I've gone to for him. He'll realize it, too, when all that whisky quits stewing inside him."

CHAPTER XII

A LESSON IN FORGIVENESS

"Well, old-timer, how you coming? You sure do sleep sound--this is the third time I've come to tell you breakfast is ready and then some. You'll get the bottom of the coffeepot, for fair, if you don't hustle." Kent left the door of the ice house wide open behind him, so that the warmth of mid-morning swept in to do battle with the chill and damp of wet sawdust and buried ice.

Manley rolled over so that he faced his visitor, and his reply was abusive in the extreme. Kent waited, with an air of impersonal interest, until he was done and had turned his face away as though the subject was quite exhausted.

"Well, now you've got that load off your mind, come on over and get a cup of coffee. But while you're thinking about whether you want anything but my heart's blood, I'm going to speak right up and tell you a few things that commonly ain't none of my business.

"Do you know your wife came within an ace of burning to death yesterday?"

Manley sat up with a jerk and glared at him. "Do you know you're burned out, slick and clean--all except the shack? Hay, stables, corral, wagons, chickens--" Kent spread his hands in a gesture including all minor details.

"I rode over there when I saw the fire coming, and it's lucky I did, old-timer. I back-fired and saved the house--and your wife--from going up in smoke. But everything else went. Let that sink into your system, will you? And just see if you can draw a picture of what woulda happened if n.o.body had showed up--if that fire had hit the coulee with n.o.body there but your wife. Why, I run onto her half-way up the bluff, packing a wet sack, to fight it at the fire guards I Now, Man, it ain't any credit to, _you_ that the worst didn't happen. I'd sure like to tell you what I think of a fellow that will leave a woman out there, twenty miles from town and ten from the nearest neighbor--and them not at home--to take a chance on a thing like that; but I can't. I never learned words enough.

"There's another thing. Old lady Hawley took more interest in her than you did; she drove out there to see how about it, as soon as the fire had burned on past and left the trail safe. And it didn't look good to her--that little woman stuck out there all by herself. She made her pack up some clothes, and brought her to town with her. She didn't want to come; she had an idea that she ought to stay with it till you showed up. But the only original Hawley is sure all right! She talked your wife plumb outa the house and into the rig, and brought her to town. She's over to the hotel now."

"Val at the hotel? How long has she been there?" Manley began smoothing his hair and his crumpled clothes with his hands, "Good heavens! You told her I'd gone on out, and had missed her on the trail, didn't you, Kent? She doesn't know I'm in town, does she? You always were a good fellow--I haven't forgotten how you--"

"Well, you can forget it now. I didn't tell her anything like that. I didn't think of it, for one thing. She knew all the time that you were in town. I'm tired of lying to her. I told her the truth. I told her you were drunk."

Manley's jaw dropped. "You--you told her--"

"Ex-actly. I told her you were drunk." Kent nodded gravely, and his lips curled as he watched the other cringe. "She called me a liar," he added, with a certain reminiscent amus.e.m.e.nt.